Alara Alara The Place

Her name is… she’s sure she can remember it, if she tries hard enough. It was something that started with a sound she can’t make any more, which lets out all the vowels, and r, and m and n, and s, so… something else. Was it Lisa? Maybe it was Lisa. Or could it have been Laura? It’s so hard to hold her memories in her head.

The people she’s living with gave her a name, since she couldn’t exactly tell them what her name used to be. They call her Athena. This is awfully ironic. Athena was the goddess of wisdom and craft, she can remember that, even if she can’t remember her own name. And now, with her memories shattered and stuffed into a brain vastly smaller than it once was, and all her dexterity gone forever, she has no wisdom and she cannot do crafts.

One of the people she lives with, a woman named Jane, opens the refrigerator. Athena smells delicious food. Ooh, is that a rotisserie chicken in there? If she times this just right, she might be able to grab the chicken and run off with it. The fridge is one of the kind with a pull-out freezer drawer on the bottom, making a convenient ledge for Athena to sit on. She waits until Jane is busy trying to get milk off of the door, and leaps, standing and stretching to grab the chicken, using the shelves of the fridge to keep her erratic balance.

“Athena, what are you doing? You ridiculous cat. Are you trying to get the chicken again?” Jane asks, in the tone of voice humans use to talk to little children and pets, and it grates on Athena’s nerves fiercely. You don’t have to talk to me like that. I understand you! But of course, she has no way of conveying that. At one point she tried to rip keys off a keyboard so she could spell out the truth of what she was, but her cat brain couldn’t handle making sense of the symbols on the keyboard and she wasn’t sure she still knew how to spell anything. What sound did a D make, again? Was it the buh sound or the duh sound?

Based on “Dr. Ultraviolet Meets Her Nemesis“, a supervillain comedy I am working on about a supervillain who has to take shelter with her extremely mundane sister.

“What exactly is this… stuff?” Ultraviolet asked her sister, with a sneer that she hoped was making it clear she could be using stronger language.

“You asked for books,” Scarlett said, “so I brought you some of mine.”

Ultraviolet tried to count to 10, but Scarlett interrupted at 4. “I think you might really like Chiaoscuro. It’s about a superheroine who falls in love with a magnetic, charismatic villain—”

“It’s a romance novel,” Ultraviolet said.

“Yes. I know they weren’t your favorites but—”

“I despise romance novels,” Ultraviolet said. “Would it have truly killed you to go to a bookstore and get me something I might possibly enjoy, rather than just bringing me whatever dreck you happened to have lying around on your bookshelf?”

“There aren’t any bookstores around here. Everest drove them all out of business. I could have ordered from them, but they’re evil.”

Ultraviolet happened to know that this was absolutely true. The last time she’d been invited to attend the Villainy Connection yearly networking event for supervillains, Everest’s CEO Josh Bevel had been the keynote speaker. Given that she herself was a supervillain, this was hardly a dealbreaker for her. “Libraries exist, then. And what about used book stores?”

“Look, I went out of my way to do you a favor, Violet,” Scarlett said. “It’s not like I don’t have a lot going on. I’ve got four kids, the economy’s been slowing down and people aren’t buying houses so much lately, and I’ve been having issues with Gavin.”

From long experience with her sister, Ultraviolet knew that Scarlett wanted her to ask about her issues with Gavin, but Ultraviolet would have had difficulty caring less. “How hard is it to bring me a book that isn’t a godawful romance novel? Do I look like the kind of suburban mom who’s wasted her life dreaming of some Mr. Wonderful sweeping her off her feet?”

“It sounds like you’re saying that’s what I am.”

“The shoes don’t just fit, Scarlett, they’re on sale and you have ten pairs in your closet.”( Read more... )